Ten weeks after Tom Dunbabin and his business partner walked into Redondo Beach City Hall to discuss opening the community’s first craft brewery, they received the unanimous blessing of the Planning Commission.

Construction began almost immediately at their brewery location. Coastline Brewing Co. hopes to have its first batch of brews available by Christmas.

But even as a microbrew revolution is on the horizon, not all would-be brewers in the Los Angeles area have a success story.

Take the Van Nuys craft brewery owners Alastair and Jennifer Boarse, who sold their house to finance their dream. The couple estimated they have spent $200,000 in a year of dickering over details included on their initial application for MacLeod Ale Brewing Co. with Los Angeles planners.

Anticipating an uneventful road to regulatory approval they leased a building, hired a brewer and aimed to open the San Fernando Valley’s first craft brewery by July.

But a morass of emails, telephone calls and meetings bogged the process down to the point Jennifer Boarse recently threatened to take their business investment to a more welcoming city.

As of last week they believe they had finally satisfied all the bureaucratic demands. The couple remain hopeful they could open in early 2014.

“We are making progress, but it’s a lot slower than we thought,” Alastair Boarse said in something of an understatement. “We’ve talked to breweries in surrounding areas and they gave us their condolences that we chose Los Angeles.”

That’s perhaps explains in part why the burgeoning craft beer movement is booming in Los Angeles County suburbia by comparison.

Torrance, for instance, has seen four breweries pop up in the last four years alone, while a fifth, El Segundo Brewing Co., opened just to the north in 2011 in the shadow of Los Angeles International Airport.

Craft breweries don’t serve food, have televisions or stay open late. Some don’t even have a sign out front.

In short, they are a perfect fit for Torrance, which no one will confuse with a livelier town like nearby Hermosa Beach, its beachside bars mobbed on weekends with a young, partying clientele.

“Three and a half years ago when I went out and said ‘Torrance and the South Bay will be the hub of Los Angeles County (craft) brewing,’ people would literally laugh in my face,” recalled Rich Marcello, co-owner of Strand Brewing Co., the first craft brewery in Torrance, which will mark its fourth anniversary this fall.

Advertisement

“Someone was even quoted as saying ‘Who would ever go to Torrance to drink beer?’ ”, he added. “Now we have five breweries and more coming. We’re going to have the last laugh.”

With a total of a half dozen breweries soon to become reality, the South Bay has emerged as the epicenter of the county’s craft beer industry.

But breweries are opening rapidly elsewhere, too.

The first craft brewery in the Long Beach area, Timeless Pints in Lakewood, opened last month, for instance.

The latter became the city’s first craft brewery in part to avoid the red tape that has bedeviled entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, said Stephen Kooshian, one of the three brewers.

It appears it won’t be the last.

“We’re continuing to have discussions with different breweries looking to locate in the city,” said Steve Sizemore, the community development director.

Torrance’s newest craft brewery, Smog City Brewing Co., came to the city for much the same reason as Pacific Plate located in Monrovia.

“We had been dealing with the city of Los Angeles for about three years intermittently, going in and talking to them,” said Smog City co-owner Laurie Porter, a Westchester resident. “Every time we went in it was not the best experience and every time we went in it was a different person. We came to Torrance and it was the same people (we were dealing with) over and over and over again I felt like I could create a relationship with, get to know and if I needed an answer I could call the right person.”

Torrance nurtures its reputation as one of the county’s most business-friendly cities. It is, said Marcello, who urged Smog City to come to Torrance, a deserved status.

“The city understands manufacturing, which is what beer producing is,” he said, adding the brewery recently received a municipal award for creating a new “industry cluster.” “We were under a lot of pressure. If we failed I guarantee you that no one was rushing to come to Torrance to open their brewery.”

The craft brewing industry is growing rapidly.

The number of brew pubs and craft breweries jumped by 20 percent from 2011 to 2012 alone, according to the national Brewers Association.

But there’s plenty of potential for growth in the Los Angeles area, which lags far behind Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area and San Diego in terms of market penetration.

Alan Newman, the force behind Angel City Brewing, which reopened earlier this year in the downtown Arts District after moving under different ownership from a longtime home just outside Torrance, said that room for growth is what attracted him to Los Angeles.

Craft beer has only about 4 percent of the market in Los Angeles, compared to 28 percent in the Pacific Northwest, a figure that climbs closer to 50 percent when draft beer sales are included, he said.

“The world of craft beer skipped over Los Angeles County and it now seems to be coming back into the fold with the rest of the West Coast,” Newman said. “You’re going to see an explosion of craft breweries of all sizes and I think those brewers are going to turn on the people of Los Angeles and you are going to see that market share grow from a 4 to a 10 in the next 18 to 24 months.”

That’s quite a growth spurt for a city that Eagle Rock Brewing co-owner Jeremy Raub described as a “wasteland of beer” when it became the first new brewery to open within the Los Angeles city limits in more than six decades in November 2009.

“It’s crazy to think we were leading the pack and we’re only 3½ years old,” said Raub, who is also president of the nascent Los Angeles County Brewers Guild. “I feel like we’ve accomplished our goal in the sense that we’re helping to get this beer culture developed. But it still has a long way to go.”

Theories abound about why the craft beer movement was slow to catch on here.

Craft beer, at its heart, is about good conversation and community, yet fragmented Southern California has always been short on those, goes one supposition.

The locavore movement, which emphasizes locally grown food and includes the fresh beer that fans of craft brewing embrace, was slower to catch on here than in other parts of the country, too.

And perhaps trendy Angelenos were still swirling their glasses of red wine after watching the movie “Sideways,” failing to initially appreciate the craft beer trend.

But the pioneers of the Southern California craft beer movement are gradually seeing it catch on. Los Angeles’ Golden Road Brewing, which opened in 2011, doubled its production last year and expects to hit 3,000 barrels this year, said co-founder Tony Yanow.

“We’re a little late to the party, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “But we’re getting the benefit of what did and didn’t work in other cities.

“What’s cool about the scene in LA is it’s growing so quickly,” he added. “We all kind of started within a couple of years of each other, so there’s a fun fraternity of brewers. We’re building it together.”

Even if that building is happening faster in some parts of the county than others.

Redondo Beach, for instance, saw what was happening in neighboring Torrance and wanted to grab its share, said Dunbabin of Coastline Brewing.

Even before a craft brewery inquired about coming into the city, Redondo Beach had zoning regulations and other rules in place so the requirements were clear, he said.

“The people who work in the Planning Department understood the business,” Dunbabin said. “They saw this as us putting in a destination in north Redondo.”

That’s a far different reception from the one Van Nuys’ MacLeod Ales received from their municipal bureaucracy.

The top administrator from the city’s Planning Department did not respond to a request for comment last week.

It could be worse.

MacLeod at least has found a brewery location.

Northridge’s proposed Street Sign Brewing Co., which is also trying to become the first craft brewery to operate in the Valley, has spent months fruitlessly looking for a suitable light industrial location in the community, said co-founder Vic Chouchanian.

“We’re going through a different type of hell,” he said wryly. “People don’t understand what a microbrewery is. They think it’s either a brewpub or a giant brewery like Budweiser.

“We’re basically down to our last two or three locations in the valley that will work for us,” Chouchanian added. “If it was easy, everybody would have done it, right?”

Still, the evolution of the local craft beer scene is in full swing.

“It’s a really exciting time to be in the beer industry in Los Angeles and the people who are most excited are the beer drinkers because there’s some really great beers out there,” Yanow said. “And, shockingly, just 40 months ago it was hard to get a decent pint in this town.”